Im liking this new system. If an enemy that you are wary of decides to take a world near your territory, you need to retake that world before they can make it a sector capital and designate jumpship yards to act as beceacons.

Basically, now you can't establish colonys on the other side of the galaxy, you need a continous chain of sector caps and jumpyards to move jumpships from one place to another. If you want to invade enemy territory, you basically have to establish a beachhead. Take a world near your enemy, defend it for a full day realtime while the sector cap designation goes thru, then you can operate jumpships in the area. You also have a supply chain of sorts, since if the enemy takes one of your sector caps between the beachhead and your productive inner worlds, you can no longer move jumpships from one side of he galaxy to the other until you reestablish the chain. This allows for some interesting strategy. Jumpbeacons by themselves may have solved most of the current issues.

Jumpships don't need a continuous chain, they can jump to any beacon you control from anywhere.

You can still establish remote colonies, it's just slightly slower because the jumptransports have to convoy with gunships. Unless you're in F&M you don't get a beacon at the remote colony, so you have to wait another 24 hours for the sector capital to establish and then take a second world to be the beacon. Then jumpships will be able to travel freely to the distant colony even if it's on the opposite side of the galaxy.

Perhaps it will only cause a problem if a sector becomes controlled and well defended. This will change the way we have to play. Do you want to not worry about jumpships and send transports with gunships or do you want to try and establish a colony? We actually can have more objectives and ways to play then a full scale war.

The Anacreon core library suggests that direct/"cannon" weapons do 50% less damage in dark nebulas and that missile weapons have 25% less range. Was anyone else aware of this and has anyone verified that these effects are actually in place?

If so it partially explains why hammerhead use(d) missiles and why Mantas had such a goofy high-damage attack- both units were designed to be effective under conditions that don't favor cannon attacks. It also means that Cyclops' 20 Mm attack should have actually put them beyond hypersonic range.

Actually, this calls for very special consideration when selecting new sector capitals, otherwise you'd have wasted 24 hours. You'd want to make sure its a non-hostile TL7+ world (if possible), and its control radius should ideally cover the maximum number of worlds without overlapping with other SC's control radii.

It should also be bunched up close to 5 other worlds: 2 citadels, 1 foundation, 1 trade hub and 1 jumpbeacon. The jumpbeacon is optional and 1 citadel will also be fine. These will be the "core worlds" of the cluster, and the optimal configuration of the empire would be a hexagonal pattern resembling something like:

_O#O_
O#O#O
_O#O_

Where O represents a cluster and # is the space between them. Of course this is purely idealistic and would depend on the territory available. The old Imperium had a rectangular configuration with clusters stacked on top of each other row-by-row, which wasn't actually optimal because it left a quite few worlds unconnected in the spaces between clusters, but it worked well enough. Perhaps this could be added to the guide...

WaywardDevice did something like that IIRC. In practice that configuration is not always ideal because space is not homogeneous; it contains voids and rift zones and regions with lower-value worlds that don't add much to your empire, plus strategically important stuff like the last corner of a nebula or a couple planets with abundant chronimium.

I think it's less strategically risky now to have more capitals and more control zone overlap, since planetary conquest seems to be more costly and blitzkreig conquest isn't as easy.

Also consider that you'll probably want jumpbeacons on the edges of your zone of control, not just internally, in order to project force outwards for expansion and deterrence.